Alone in the cemetery, Pasolini addresses his “civil message” to the prostitutes along the Tiber and the scrap-metal merchants of Testaccio. He can only compare his romantic impulse to the youthful idealism of Shelley, who had drowned off the Italian coast in 1822:
. . . Ah, how well
I understand, silent in the wind’s wet
humming, here where Rome is silent,
among wearily agitated cypresses,
next to you, Spirit whose inscription calls out Shelley . . . . How well I understand the vortex
of feelings, the capricious fate (Grecian
in the aristocratic Northern traveller’s
heart) which swallowed him in the dazzling turquoise Tyrrhenian Sea: the carnal
joy of adventure, aesthetic
and boyish –
The doleful cemetFery music conceals a notion of death as a way to spiritual redemption. “Mo’ sto bene” – “I’ll be all right now”, cries the thief-hero of Pasolini’s first, great Roman film, Accattone (1961), as he lies dying after a traffic accident.
The film’s street violence was to find more ample expression in Pasolini’s great films of the classical Greek myths, Oedipus Rex (1967) and Medea (1970), which starred Maria Callas. His earliest movies, however, were scripted in Roman dialect to remind Italy of a language it had largely ignored. It was part of his lifelong polemic against what he called “la lingua dei padroni”.
After graduating in literature from Bologna University in 1943, Pasolini moved with his parents to Casarsa, a small town in Friuli near the Yugoslavian border. Friuli was the birthplace of Pasolini’s mother, and his attachment to the region was an extension of his profound love for Susanna Pasolini. His earliest poems were written in Friulian dialect; the poor farming communities of Friulian-speaking peasants would thus become “historically self-aware”; and he, Pasolini, would be the acknowledged legislator of their awareness. This might have been the specious delusion of a young man of letters, had Pasolini not discovered the works of Gramsci.
In 1948, eleven years after Gramsci had died in a Fascist jail, his Quaderni del carcere were published in Turin. Gramsci’s “prison notebooks” would influence not only the future policies of the PCI but the entire intellectual Left in post-war Italy. Close to his heart was the question of a “popular nationalist literature”, which would incorporate marginalized Italian peoples and their dialects, and enrich the standard literary Italian consolidated by Alessandro Manzoni in his nineteenth-century novel I promessi sposi. Pasolini’s ambition was to substitute the lives and language of the Friulian poor for those of the Roman sub-proletariat.
His early days in Casarsa had been dogged by scandal. In 1949, Pasolini was charged with “corruption of minors and obscene acts in a public place”. What exactly happened is unclear, although the scandal was presumably linked to his homosexuality. Pasolini was acquitted through lack of evidence but the consequences were drastic. The Casarsa edition of the Communist L’Unità newspaper denounced Pasolini as a “bourgeois deviationist” whose fall from grace had been caused by an “unhealthy interest” in the novels of André Gide. Pasolini was expelled from the Casarsa branch of the PCI, and in the winter of 1949 he fled with his mother to Rome, “as in a novel”, he later recollected. The decision was taken without consulting his father, Carlo Alberto, an infantry officer who had served in East Africa under Mussolini, and who was left behind in Friuli.
